Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2268
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Lenzer J.
The Constant Gardener
BMJ 2005 Aug 20
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7514/462
Keywords:
Le Carre gardener film
Notes:
Ralph Faggotter’s Comments: When the Cold War ended, John Le Carre looked around for alternative sources of suspense and intrigue. He soon recognised that the global pharmaceutical industry provided plenty of material and the result was his book, ‘The Constant Gardener’ which has now been made into a film.
After reading this excellent film review from the BMJ, you will be itching to see the film.
Full text:
BMJ 2005;331:462 (20 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7514.462
reviews
Film
The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles US release date: 26 August UK release date: 7 October www.theconstantgardener.com
Rating: ****
A Harris Poll last year that found only 13% of the US public believes that pharmaceutical firms are “generally honest and trustworthy.” That low regard puts drug companies on a par with tobacco and oil companies. However, drug companies might look back fondly at that 13% rating after The Constant Gardener opens in US cinemas on 26 August.
The film, based on the eponymous novel by John le Carré, opens with the brutal murder of a young activist, Tessa Quayle (played by Rachel Weisz), in Kenya. Her husband, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a member of the British High Commission, is forced to navigate a deadly house of mirrors, and some personal demons, in order to pursue her killers. Along the way, he uncovers diplomatic secrets, corporate conspiracy, and, ultimately, the real reason for his wife’s activism-and her murder.
Fans of le Carré‘s cold war spy novels will enjoy the taut intrigue of The Constant Gardener, in which cold war enemies are replaced by Big Pharma and its critics. Director Fernando Meirelles (Oscar nominee as the director of City of God) centres the story in a remote area of northern Kenya, giving tantalising glimpses of African landscapes-set to captivating and unforgettable music.
A stinging critique of the drugs industry: The Constant Gardener, starring Rachel Weisz
Le Carré wrote in the Nation magazine on 9 April 2001 that he settled on drug companies as the focus of The Constant Gardener after rejecting the “scandal of spiked tobacco” and the “vast human disaster” of oil companies. “The multinational pharmaceutical world, once I entered it, got me by the throat and wouldn’t let go. Big Pharma, as it is known, offered everything: the hopes and dreams we have of it; its vast, partly realized potential for good; and its pitch-dark under-side, sustained by huge wealth, pathological secrecy, corruption, and greed.”
Le Carré takes a bit of poetic licence in his novel in having his protagonist murdered. It might be presumed that this would taint the film and make it less believable, but such a presumption would be a shame. The film is a stinging critique of the drug industry and one that should be taken seriously.
For example, the film’s portrayal of Big Pharma exploiting the continent of Africa as a vast laboratory to satisfy Western demand for drugs while placing African lives at risk might be seen as the stuff of fiction. But recent episodes of drug companies testing their products demonstrate that Mr le Carré‘s charge, sadly, has some grounding in reality.
The secrecy surrounding drug company dealings in The Constant Gardener is likewise torn from news stories about scandals involving the suppression of negative data. Added to the stew, drug companies can conceal not just some of the outcomes of their studies, but they even conceal-under trade secrets laws-the identity of the nation in which they are testing drugs.
The real fiction here is that the public health is best served by the unbridled capitalism of drug companies, as The Constant Gardener makes it is made clear that the people used as guinea pigs in the testing of drugs will not have the money to buy those drugs once they are on the market.
Le Carré also wrote in the Nation that while doing research for The Constant Gardener, “I learned, for instance, of how Big Pharma in the United States had persuaded the State Department to threaten poor countries’ governments with trade sanctions in order to prevent them from making their own cheap forms of the patented lifesaving drugs that could ease the agony of 35 million men, women and children in the Third World who are HIV-positive.”
In a taped interview, he said, “We are being spun to, deceived, [and] lied to; when we live in a world of virtual news.” He called the film a “semi-documentary” that can fill a “documentary/fictional gap in human knowledge” created by the “inanities of received information as it is transmitted to us now.” The film, he said, “is worth more to me because I do think it is timely. I think for five minutes, for the blink of a star-historically speaking-it may actually cause people to stop and look and listen.”
Jeanner Lenzer, medical investigative journalist
Kingston, New York state, USA jeanne.lenzer@gmail.com
